Brunel Museum
A small museum with a colossal story: the world’s first tunnel under a navigable river. Marc Brunel’s shield and his 19-year-old son Isambard turned a dangerous idea into a new kind of city. In the Grand Entrance Hall you stand inside the original shaft, now a performance space with Victorian soot in the brickwork.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
Grand Entrance Hall (Tunnel Shaft)
Where London learned to go under waterA vast cylindrical void lowered the tunnellers—today it’s echo and brick telling the story.
📍 Rotherhithe shaft, down the stairs
Shield & Digging
Prototype for modern tunnel-boring machinesBrunel’s iron ‘shield’ divided labour and protected workers—an idea now scaled to TBMs that chew continents.
📍 Main gallery displays
The Tunnel as Attraction
Engineering turned into nightlifeBefore trains, Victorians paid to stroll beneath the Thames among stalls and buskers.
📍 Exhibition film & ephemera
Brunel & Son
Genius as apprenticeshipIsambard Kingdom Brunel began here, surviving a tunnel flood; his later bridges and ships start to make new sense.
📍 Curator talk times vary
Inspire your Friends
- The Thames Tunnel opened in 1843 as a pedestrian promenade with shops—trains only arrived decades later.
- A sudden inrush of the Thames nearly drowned 19-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel; he wrote about hearing the river before he saw it.
- Brunel’s ‘shield’ is the ancestor of modern TBMs—today’s machines still copy its segmented, cell-by-cell protection.
